The Most Uncontested Fact of Jesus' Life

The most uncontested fact of Jesus' life is that he was crucified. The impression left by the Gospels is that the Jerusalem religious leaders instigated a procedure against Jesus that was finally executed by the Roman authorities. It is worth considering, however, exactly why Jesus was crucified. Jews, after all, did not randomly kill people, even over theological disagreements. The Mishnah, an 8OO-page Jewish sequel to the Torah that spans the time from roughly the birth of Jesus until A.D. 200, preserves thousands of differences of opinions among rabbis without one of them leading to a plot of death and execution. The fate of Jesus, in other words, was categorically different from that of other Jewish rabbis. Not the least formidable obstacle to the quest for a non-messianic Jesus who champions our causes and espouses our ideologies, to paraphrase a modern critic, is that such a Jesus would have scarcely gotten himself crucified.

There was, however, one ground for which Jews did impose the death sentence, and that would account for Jesus' execution: the charge of blasphemy. The earliest Gospel, in fact, preserves this charge in Mark 14:61-64. All the Gospel accounts agree that the point at which Jesus most threatened the Jerusalem auuthorities was his attack on the temple (e.g., Mark 11:27-33). What might have caused Jesus to presume to challenge the most sacred site of Judaism? Mark clearly indicates that Jesus understood his person to supersede the temple itself, and that makes sense only if Jesus understood himself to be divinely appointed and empowered. The Jerusalem authorities, of course, took both the deed and the word justiifying it as a blasphemous presumption on Jesus' part, justly punishable by death. The charge of blasphemy testifies unmistakably-even if from his opponents-to Jesus' true mission and purpose.
 

Our examination of four aspects of the Gospel tradition allows us to affirm with confidence that the Gospels preserve a diverse and significant body of evidence of the verus sensus ]esu. Nowhere is the continuity between the memory of the early Church and the self-understanding of Jesus more discernible than in the many witnesses to Jesus' bearing, his consciousness of standing in an absolutely unique relationship to God as his Father, and his authority to speak and act on behalf of God in the world of humanity and nature.
 
There is a host of scholars who understand that the Gospels point to the Apostles' Creed, not away from it as the Jesus Seminar insists. The eminent Christian historian of Tubingen, Martin Hengel, lays an ax at the root of the modern presumption to find an adequate Jesus by the methods of modern historiography and sociology:
 
"Jesus' claim to authority goes far beyond anything that can be adduced as proophetic prototypes or parallels from the field of the Old Testament and from the New Testament period .... [Jesus] remains in the last resort incommensurable, and so basically confounds every attempt to fit him into the categories suggested by the phenomenology or sociology of religion."
 
"Did Jesus know that he had an identity which his followers later came to understand in terms of his being God?" asks Raymond Brown, a Roman Catholic who stands at the apex of American New Testament scholars.
 
"If he was God (and most Christians do agree on that), did he know who he was? I think the simplest answer to that is yes. Obviously there is no way of proving an affirmative answer because we do not have material describing all his life. Yer in the Gospel material given to us Jesus is always shown as being aware of a particuular relationship with God that enables him to speak with awesome authority. There is never a scene in the Gospel portrait where he discovers something about himself that he did not know before. I realize that what I am saying runs against some popular views thar would have Jesus discovering his identity at the baptism or some other time; but there is no evidence for such views. The baptismal scene is designed to tell the readers who Jesus is, not to tell him who he is."
 
Statistics, it is often said, can prove anything. Likewise, critical theories about the Bible can produce various results, depending on the disposition of scholars. We have seen that some of the very theories and methods employed by the Jesus Semiinar to discredit the New Testament portrait of Jesus when handled carefully and reasonably actually underscore the veracity of the account. The most reasonable answer to the question of why the Gospels present Jesus the way they do is that is essentially the way he was. The Gospels faithfully preserve the memory that Jesus left on his followers, that he was divinely legitimated and empowered to be God's Son and Servant.
 
Reprinted from Touchstone: A Journal of Ecumenical Orthodoxy, Winter 1996, Volume 9, Number 1.